The other issue that the recent debates on unbundling have highlighted is privacy. The data and metadata needed for these reputation/authority ratings is sensitive, so the idea of having independent filtering middleware services access this data is a concern. As a preview of my developing thinking on that, I am returning to the old idea of "infomediaries," for which the time may finally have come. "Infomediaries" (Information intermediaries) were first suggested in 1997 in Harvard Business Review -- a trusted user agent that manages their personal data and attention and negotiates with businesses on how it is used and for what compensation. That idea surfaced again in a law review article in 2016 as "Information Fiduciaries" and in HBR in 2018, with more of a focus on "data dignity" as "Mediators of Individual Data" ("MIDs"). More on that to follow.
The "original sin of the Internet," advertising, has proven so successful that infomediaries never got critical mass in commerce beyond narrow uses. (I was CTO from 1998-2000 for a kind of infomediary service that had some success.) But as after debating the privacy issues of the kind of social media algorithms I was suggesting bed unbundled, I now think the time may be right, since the ad model has clearly sent us down a path to disaster. While the huge profits of the ad model have made it difficult, regulators may now see their way clear to mandate the creation of infomediaries to serve as fiduciaries for users of social media -- to manage their private data and metadata in ways that can be used by user agents to filter newsfeeds and make recommendations.
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